Could you ever pretend to understand
living in a world that gave you no shelter
from the coarse wind of history
and the coarser rain of rhetoric?

The shambles of those walls offer no protection.
But, after all, they say
why do you need walls in the jungle?

No one has to tell you
out loud
that you were born
to be thrown away.
The ache of rotting teeth,
the feeble acquiescence  
to raw sewage,
and the 400 dollar offer
to silence the poison in your veins.
They were loud enough.

I imagine there is a moment
between doorless stalls
and postless football fields,
where children, who grow like
wild daffodils,
see the other side of the bridge.
And then they know
until the end,
that it has always been
someone’s choice.

There is no longer any excuse.
In fact, there hasn’t been for a
very long time.

We have seen bloodshed
on soil around the world.  
Over one million lives,
in the name of
freedom,
democracy,
capitalism,
& I can’t quite recall the others
at the moment.

We have connected
through time and space.
We heard and we watched
Bell & Lindbergh
Ford & Armstrong
Gates & Jobs
transform the very fabric of our realities,
uncovering expanding realms
of possibility.

We have healed and protected
our fragile bodies.
Decades ago,
Mr. Salk became part of evening
prayers.
We began having less babies,  
and we marveled for 112 days
at the beating of the first
artificial heart.
Wondering or not
whether new bionic inclinations
had affected our humanity.

We have evolved
collective creeds
through unexpected revolutionaries
and in spite of dragging feet.
While AFL & CIO
became household names,
Ms. Anthony and Dr. King
made us cry
and shake
and question
our very foundations.

And yet,
after 165 years of change,
I say, with a heavy heart,
and millions of people,
and billions of dollars,
and a dream,
that the 1850’s schoolhouse
has been only
feebly & perfunctorily
remodeled.

From their graves,
Mr. Mann & Mr. Dewey ask,
“What will it take?”

They call it scholar talk. It’s not better than home talk, it’s just different. It’s for school.

Like her, they start saying “goodness gracious” when things get crazy. Like someone else, they continue saying “**** ***** *****” when someone bothers them.

Do you feel like you spend a lot of your time disciplining?  
I feel like I spend all my time disciplining, she says.

One boy tries to jump out of the window of her classroom.
Later he tells her that if he doesn’t get another nice teacher he will **** himself.

But lots of kids say they are going to **** themselves. It’s the one threat that gets them one-on-one attention in a class of two dozen.
The school psychologist tells her she needs to manage her classroom better.

Her first principal is fired for abusing her disabled husband.
Her second principal admonishes her for mentioning that **** sapiens originated in Africa.
There are too many religious parents here to teach evolution.
“Where are you even getting this information?” he asks her with a straight face.

One day, in the fall, she cries amidst the chaos. The next day, one student tells another,
“Don’t you dare make my teacher cry again.”

She picks them up on the weekends and takes them to middle school basketball games as a treat. “You can even meet the coach if you behave,” she says to eager 2nd grade faces.

They read about fairytale princesses, and they ask her, “She’s like you, right Ms. Andrews?”

White ***** is hurled at her as often as chairs across the classroom. But come Friday morning they sit silent in their seats, hoping to earn lunch with Ms. Andrews. She gives out certificates, prizes, and free activities, but kids cry over not making “lunch bunch”.  How am I doing today? Am I doing good today?

There is non-profit prestige in moving to West Baltimore. Fresh fruit, new winter coats, and new laptops for every student. Within days, the new computers are slammed against desks and the dictionary covers are ripped off with bicth scribbled inside.
At least spell it right, her final plea.
New stuff doesn’t matter that much when they’re angry all the time, she says to the one school social worker.

What would be the single most helpful thing someone could do for these families?
Birth control, she answers.

Babies are celebrated, at birth. They are a temporary lighthouse.

Some of her students have multiple siblings who regularly visit Johns Hopkins for birth defects. Some of her students are heads of their households, walking their younger siblings to and from school every day. Another teacher gets in trouble for giving out free condoms to 16-year-old girls, many of whom are pregnant.

I honestly think you shouldn't get more welfare after two children, she says. I don’t think many of these babies are conceived out of love.

It’s painful for her to say that. It’s not what you learn at a prestigious liberal arts college. Not when you’re a progressive liberal aware of social constructs and institutionalized power hierarchies. Especially when you chose TFA because you really are committed to working in education policy.  

But you are beating the odds, because Baltimore has one of the highest TFA dropout rates in the country. Though 72 percent of all TFA teachers leave teaching within 5 years. The five-week training program and lack of connection with the community were not enough. Or maybe it’s because they never wanted to be teachers in the first place.

But, they ask, “No one wants those jobs anyway, so who would be there instead?”

Is that really the right question?

Another TFA friend recently quit because he started having panic attacks and losing weight. I’m pretty miserable, she says, but I know it’s for an end. Still, I go home and wonder,
Am I making a difference?

In 1972, the Fourth Dragon King of Bhutan created the concept of Gross National Happiness, a new index measuring different areas of life quality. He said, “the essence of the philosophy of Gross National Happiness is the peace and happiness of our people, and the security and sovereignty of the nation.”

The Dragon King was brave with his wisdom. He spoke the truth against the prevailing myth of our time. He dared to ask questions sage in their foundations. What does it mean to live a fulfilling life? What does a successful community look like? How do we answer these questions knowing what we know about our own humanity?

Asking those questions was like coming home again from the rain, and wondering why you had ever left. An act in response to the desperate yearning to be human. A truth so clear, it has been embraced by dozens of other countries.

But not by the United States of America. We are big, and we influence others, not the other way around. We are powerful, and everyone knows it. We are successful, and we know it.

We worship, and ask, and measure the things that matter.

As Adam Smith said, “No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.”

We measure the things that matter.

What is the essence of the philosophy behind Gross National Product? In the words of Robert Kennedy, “It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

We have defined success by that which we are able to hold in our hands. We have done so to our very core. We have done so to our most vulnerable. We have done so to our most educated.

In 2011, Amy Chua (the Tiger Mom), laid a truth so bare we could not look away. By her own admission, her tough tactics were simplified and misunderstood: “If I could push a magic button and choose either happiness or success for my children, I’d choose happiness in a second.”

The Tiger Mom would choose happiness for her children, and yet they still would not be successful.

We like to pretend that we don’t play this game, but she played so fervently, we could not look away. We like to pretend that perfect SAT scores, endless club affiliations, mastery of languages and instruments, athletic prowess, social grace, and an unwavering commitment to the community—that those things come naturally from the pursuit of a well-balanced, genuine teenage life. We like to pretend that we are not Excellent Sheep.

But we believe that we measure the things that matter.

From the Stanford-Binet IQ, to the Army Alpha Test, to the first ever SAT in 1926 we have used our creative engines to reduce our humanity to the likes of a No. 2 pencil. After the 1936 invention of the IBM 805—the first electronic test scanner—we would ever more become distinctive only in our conformity.

Uniform in our goals and our language, and everything else that comes in between. Echoed again and again, Bill & Melinda say, success in education is to obtain labor-market value. At least we’re honest about that. What other kinds of success could we imagine without other kinds of values? There is no magic button, there is only the stark white wall of reality that will hit you, hard, when you’re 16 or 18 or 22. And you better be prepared.

But did you know that statistically people are equally as happy one year after winning the lottery as they are one year after becoming paraplegic? Despite our 3lbs brains and large prefrontal cortexes, we are not good at imagining the conditions of our own contentment. We are only good at imagining the future of the stark white wall and the non-existence of the magic button.

Maybe, then, before we imagine anymore, we need to remember. To remember what it’s like to come home again from the rain, and wonder why you had ever left.  Maybe, then, we can finally be brave, and ask, like the Fourth Dragon King of Bhutan, What is the root of the root and the bud of the bud?

Maybe, then, we will measure the things that matter.

It is in our nature to create dichotomies,
particularly in the grayest of the gray.
How do you debate en masse,
in the absence of either or?

And so we ask—
for example,
at Harper High School
in the South Side Chicago,
where 29 current and former
students
were shot
in a single year—
we ask, disdainfully,
How do we Learn
when we can’t Breathe?
On the question of need—
at a beautiful school
with 16 security guards
4 social workers,
and more than 15 surrounding gangs—
we refer back to Maslow.

I went once,
to a high school full of
“at risk” students
and discussed dropout rates—
as high as 80 percent in some parts.
We gave them cards and figures,
and asked them to contemplate futures,
for example,
as a janitor or an NBA basketball star!
Questions so self-righteous in their ignorance
my cheeks burned,
asked to faces
six generations descended
from slavery
& six decades from
Brown vs. Board.
Are we not awed by the
logic in their response
to a system with little
historical or contemporary
evidence of their success?

We are sustained more by the
business of answering,
than asking
the right questions.

So maybe the question of
basic needs versus pedagogy
was always a false dichotomy.
Maybe, in fact,
general revenue funding &
destandardization of curricula,
universal prenatal care &
a rebirth of the arts,
do not exist in hierarchy.

Do we dare ask the question,
to everyone,
“What would you do
to make your heart sing,
if you knew you could not fail,
if you knew you could not disappoint?”

The tragedy in the irony
of No Child Left Behind
was never the inadequacy of the policy
but rather,
the assumption that it’s possible to have
no losers
in a finite game.

* * *
Each year, less than two and a half inches
of rainwater nourish Death Valley—
the hottest and driest place in North America.

* * *
We play this game all the way through.
“And what do you want to do with that [major]?”
they almost always ask,
with an unpretentious curiosity
that never quite pangs me the way I think it should.
Reassured by the familiarity of the ritual,
of asking and answering
this question
for most of my educated life.

* * *
The Valley,
marked by steady drought,
boasting record heat for days on end,
and devoid of visible life,
is remarkable in it’s
uniform emptiness.

* * *
“How are your grades?”
“What are your extracurriculars?”
“Why do you want to go to a liberal arts college?”
They ask, and I answer.
Across the hall they might ask
“Wouldn’t it make your family proud if you went to college?”
(Like expectations,
some rungs must sit lower
on finite ladders)
But the question is always the same—
it’s always a question of ends.

* * *
In the Winter of 2005
three times the normal amount of rain
wet the dry floor of Death Valley,
seeping into the scorched, thirsty cracks,
parched from praying all summer.

* * *
These ends surface
again and again
in our language.
Yet to escape the international contest
since A Nation at Risk,
investments and ends at every level
are (naturally) presumed economic.

* * *
That Spring saw the coaxing of waxy seeds,
after decades of unbroken slumber,
realized into a singular, infinite bloom.
The sleepy desert lupine
and hearty, golden poppies
felt sunlight
for the first time in 50 years.

* * *
The second tragedy,
greater than the first,
is the alienation of millions of
young beings.
The slow death
wrought by living a bounded life
of the caterpillar
never set to feel the sky.
The passions we mask and confuse
and cement ever more deeply,
hardened, at every step
by the conformity in our
expectations.
The means to which we grasp at
these apparent ends.

* * *
A sudden rush of caterpillars
fed by blue, purple and yellow blossoms
grew until they saw from above,
the spontaneous gathering
of birds, rodents, foxes, and snakes,
renewed again to life
by the tender hands of rain.

* * *
In a world where we stop asking
engineers
to build plants,
I imagine the organic
explosion
of latent seeds
everywhere.

From within the confines
of our narrowly concepted
rituals of the insular good,
we love to love babies
we love to pity children
we love to forget young adults
and we love to blame their parents.

How quickly we forget
or choose to ignore,
from the safety of
acceptance & comfortability & choice
that we once
loved & pitied & forgot
every parent we ever blamed.

How quickly we forget
or never realized
how our sunny dispositions
to judge
blind us so easily
from the facts.

For example, we know
that babies really do prefer the sound of
their mother’s voice
above all others,
that they cry in the accent of their mother’s tongue,
because her voice reverberated
down, so perfectly
into that protected capsule.
That in their glassy-eyed stare,
they see us
in a way no one else ever will.
That fetal brains
are evolutionarily genius
in the way they grow and adapt
to the threats of stress or scarcity
in ways that will shape the
rest of their lives.

We know, for example,
that children are lanterns of consciousness
looking and learning in all directions
at once.
As helpless, dependent beings
they are subconsciously
conducting experiments
and using conditional probability,
reading the complexity of human emotion,
and connecting through language
to piece together their realities.

And so, they exist,
Brilliant and Dependent,
until the impendent time
when we cast them
Worthless and Independent,
ready (or not) to plant
ready (or not) to grow
the next season of seeds.

In spite of our ignorance
and condescension
we will, eventually,
embrace 0-3
only to realize
that it was misadvertised.
That humans do not exist in disparate
parts.
They cannot, like legos,
be constructed in an orderly
fashion,
but, like everything else
on this Earth,
love and grow
wholly
with the cycles of the sun
and the universe.

It is not wrong,
but it is not enough
until we decide, instead,
on that infinite loop
from now until death
over and over
again.

Late night is my sanctuary.
Where maybe I can rest my head,
and say today
I have done enough.
I have crawled and squirmed among
the muck and beauty of this world.
I have fulfilled my sacred covenants
to my people and my society.
I have persevered and even endeavored,
with a most precise effort,
to embody gratitude,
and lust for earthly treasures.
Maybe now,
I can awake into a new world.
Where the tension of the space between the selves
I wish to be
dissipates,
leaving a raw existence--
where the mundane delights my priomoridal soul.